A selection of the amazing and unique film work of Austrian Peter Tscherkassky!

Peter Tscherkassky (born October 3, 1958) is an Austrian avant-garde filmmaker who works exclusively with found footage. All of his work is done with film and heavily edited in the darkroom, rather than relying on technological modes.

Tscherkassky began filming in 1979 when he acquired Super-8 equipment and before the end of the year he had scripted and started of the shooting of Kreuzritter. Throughout his career he conceived numerous film festivals including “The Light of Periphery – Austrian Avant-Garde Film 1957–1988” (1988), “Im Off der Geschichte” (1990), “Found Footage – Filme aus gefundenem Material” (1991), and “Unknown Territories – The American Independent Film” (1992). He was also the founding member of the newly Austria Filmmakers Cooperative which began in 1982 and resigned from his position there in 1993. His most recent work Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the series "Quinzaine des réalisateurs."

She graduated from the Hungarian University of Arts And Design) in Budapest as pupil of István Balogh, György Haiman, János Kass and Ernő Rubik. She started her career with book designs and illustrations mainly for children and contemporary Hungarian literature. Later on the film and theater posters came to the center of her interest and she was art director and designer of the „Muses” Cultural Magazine in Budapest. Beside her design activity she is an independent fine artist, stage designer and director of animated films. Her works have been shown in exhibitions, biennials and film festivals both in Hungary and abroad. Vice president of the Society of Hungarian Illustrators, film director in PannóniaFilm Studio, co-founder of Hungarian Poster Society. She works as a free lance designer in her own design studio.

Determining the coordinates of the creation of Dora Keresztes is especially helped by the artistic and thematic and technical constants of her works. There is a number of them and since the fundamental ones migrate between the individual fields of activity parallelly attended to by Keresztes, they mutually transform and the generic plasticity and imagination of these fields. The origin of her linocuts were probably the woodcuts of the middle age, the world of "Biblia Pauperum" ("Paupers' Bible") which became so popular by the designers and fine artists of expressionist movement in the beginning of the 20th century too. Also her works were deeply influenced by the simplicity of East European folk art. She made study in Hungarian and Rumenian (Transilvanian) villages observing the decoration of small old churches. She does preach that traditional forms and handmade constructions could exist further and they can be part of the contemporary art and modern design as well. She likes to travel between the past and the present and in her pictures the world keeps her totality as it was in the time of the ancient mythologies and as it is in the tales and fables. We can observe her attraction towards the grotesque and surrealism too. Especially in her colorful animated films we can feel the presence of the dreams, subconscious and imagination. In some of her design works – especially in the case of posters and logos appears the influence of the emblematic power of folk art what is mixed with the more rigorous geometrical approach. She likes using the different forms of symmetry too and she plays very often with the rhythm of positive and negative forms. The world of Dora Keresztes is rather unusual in the digital field of the contemporary design life, but she says that the fundament of the future is in the past. She knows the responsibility of the designer for the local cultures, and she does work to keep them, she works for a healthy coexistence.

Ivan Leonidovich Maximov (Russian: Иван Леонидович Максимов; born 19 November 1958) is an artist, professional animator and director.

Ivan Maximov was born on 19 November 1958 in Moscow.[1] He studied photography at the Biophysical Institute in Moscow till 1976. From 1976 - 1982 Maximov studied at the Physical-Technical Institute in Moscow. He worked as an illustrator for various magazines and from 1982 to 1986 he was an engineer at the Russian Space Research Institute. Between 1986 and 1989 Maximov took advanced studies in Film Directing and Script writing.

In the early 1990s, Maximov became involved with Russia's first gaming magazine, Video-Ace Dendy (Russian: Видео-Асс Dendy), and the television series, Dendy: The New Reality (Russian: Денди новая реальность, tr. Dendy Novaya Realnost; IPA: [ˈdʲenʲdʲɪ ˈnovəjə rʲɪˈalʲnəsʲtʲ]). Here he was in charge of designing Dendy the Elephant, Dendy's trademark mascot.[2]

Starting in 1995 Maximov worked as "virtual studio IVAN MAXIMOV" where he set up his studio at home to work on film, video and computer animation. He worked as a caricaturist for VREMYA mn and in 2000 and 2001 he worked as a caricaturist for VREMYA NOVOSTEY.

In 2003, Maximov created the computer game Full Pipe[3] at PIPE-STUDIO. The same year, he also began teaching film directing and script writing at school-studio SHAR and VGIK.

The British Film Institute claims that he "is probably the most influential modernist filmmaker in British cinema".[2]

Malcolm Le Grice was born in 1940, and studied at Slade School of Art, London. He founded the London Filmmakers' Co-op workshop in the late 1960s, at the same time introducing film to fine art students at St Martins School of Art and Goldsmith's College, London. He has balanced his continuing practice as a filmmaking artist with campaigning for the artform in print, in his books Abstract Film and Beyond 1977 and Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (BFI) 2001, in higher education, and in committees at the British Film Institute and the Arts Council. His most recent works have been digital video installations.

Born in May 1940, Malcolm Le Grice started as a painter but began to make film and computer works in the mid 1960's. Since then he has shown regularly in Europe and the USA and his work has been screened in many international film festivals. He has also shown in major art exhibitions like the Paris Biennale No.8, Arte Inglese Oggi, Milan, Une Histoire du Cinema, Paris, Documenta 6, Kassel, X-Screen at the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, and Behind the Facts at the Fondacion Joan Miró, Barcelona. His work has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Louvre Museum in Paris and the Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London and is in permanent collections including: the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Royal Belgian Film Archive, Brussels; the National Film Library of Australia, Canberra; German Cinamatheque Archive, Berlin; Canadian Distribution Centre, Montreal and Archives du Film Experimental D'Avignon. A number of longer films have been transmitted on British TV, including 'Finnegans Chin', 'Sketches for a Sensual Philosophy' and 'Chronos Fragmented'. His main work since the mid 1980s is in video and digital media and includes the multi-projection video installation works 'The Cyclops Cycle' and Treatise. Le Grice has written critical and theoretical work including a history of experimental cinema 'Abstract Film and Beyond' (1977, Studio Vista and MIT). For three years in the 1970's he wrote a regular column for the art monthly Studio International and has published numerous other articles on film, video and digital media. Many of these have been collected and recently published under the title 'Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age' by the British Film Institute (2001). Le Grice is a Professor Emeritus of the University of the Arts London.

Brilliant animations from one of the most well-known animators Holland has ever produced, Paul Driessen

Paul Driessen (born 1940) is a Dutch film director, animator and writer. His short films have won more than fifty prizes all over the world, including the Life Achievement Awards at both Ottawa and Zagreb animation festivals, and an Academy Award nomination for "3 misses". His films: 3 Misses and 2D or Not 2D were included in the Animation Show of Shows.

After studying graphic design and illustration at the Art Academy in Utrecht, Driessen began animating TV-commercials in Holland in the 1960, although he had no training in that art at all. When George Dunning, in search for talent, found Driessen at the Cine Cartoon Centre in Hilversum, he hired him as an animator for his feature animation film Yellow Submarine (1968). He also helped Driessen to emigrate to Canada where he became a member of the National Film Board of Canada in 1972.

Driessen's unique style can be easily recognised by the delicate quality of his ever-moving and wiggling lines, as well as by the fluid but awkward movements of his characters. His storytelling sometimes splits up the screen into three or even six different parts, with all actions nicely woven into each other.

In the 1980s Driessen taught animation at the University of Kassel, Germany, after Jan Lenica. Two of his student's films, "Balance" by Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein, and Quest (short film) by Tyron Montgomery and Thomas Stellmach, won Academy Awards.

"An Old Box" ("Une vieille boîte") (1975)

"David" (1977)

"The Killing of an Egg" ("Ei om Zeep") (1977)

"Ter land, ter zee en in de lucht" ("On Land, at Sea and in the Air") (1980)

"Jeu de coudes" (Elbowing) (1980)

"Het Treinhuisje" ("Home on the Rails") (1981)

"La Belle et la boîte" ("Oh What a Knight") (1982)

"Spiegel eiland" ("Sunny Side Up") (1985)

"De Schrijver en de Dood" ("The Writer") (1988)

"The Water People" (1992)

"The End of the World in Four Seasons" ("La fin du monde en quatre saisons") (1995)

A selection of Polish animator Jerzy Kucia's amazing films

Polish animator Jerzy Kucia has directed thirteen animated films, all of which he also wrote, produced and art directed. He is also an illustrator and painter and teaches animation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, where he heads the Animated Film Department.

Kucia's films have been honoured at festivals and retrospectives around the world, and won many awards. Technically complex, blending drawing, photographic images and manipulated live-action footage, their minimalist narratives are emotionally compelling. For this reason, perhaps, Polish critic Marc’n Gizycki named him "the Bresson of animation".